China pays ‘highest price’ for flooding
Country leads world with economic activity worth US$3.3 trillion at risk
Around a quarter of the world’s population face a “significant” risk from once-in-a-century floods, a global study has found.
Nearly 70 per cent of the 1.8 billion at risk live in South and East Asia, including 395 million people on the mainland and 390 million in India.
The world’s two largest nations by population combined account for more than one-third of global exposure to a significant risk, which researchers defined as floods at least 15cm in depth.
China leads the world in terms of the economic risk from such floods, which have a 1 per cent chance of happening in any given year, with economic activity worth US$3.3 trillion at risk.
It is followed by the United States at US$1.1 trillion and Japan at US$700 million, according to the study by researchers with the World Bank and Deltares, a Dutch research institute.
In China, the risk is greater along the coast and the Yellow River valley – an area sometimes described as “China’s sorrow” because of its long history of catastrophic floods – according to the article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications yesterday.
At present parts of southern China are experiencing record levels of rainfall, with 240,000 people being evacuated in the region of Guangxi and a total of 3.75 million affected in some way.
The rain and resulting floods have engulfed homes, crops and roads, causing direct economic losses of more than 12.48 billion yuan (HK$14.63 billion).
Summer floods are common, but the weather has become more extreme due to climate change.
Flooding in Henan province last year claimed almost 400 lives, displaced nearly 1 million people, and led to direct economic losses estimated at 133.7 billion yuan, according to government data.
Globally, researchers called for action to boost disaster prevention and recovery capacity in hotspots where poverty and flood exposure coincide. They said at least 170 million people exposed to flood risks lived in dire poverty on less than US$1.90 per day, 88 per cent of whom lived in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
“Under current conditions, more people than previously known are exposed to flood risks. Climate change and risky urbanisation patterns are expected to further aggravate these risks in coming years,” the study said.
“Yet, when prioritising flood protection investments, focusing on the monetary exposure of assets and economic activity is bound to bias attention toward high-income countries and economic hubs. Low-income countries are disproportionately exposed to flood risks, while being more vulnerable to disastrous long-term impacts.”
Of the US$9.8 trillion of economic activity in flood-risk areas, about 12 per cent of 2020 global GDP, 84 per cent is in wealthier countries, the study showed.
High-income countries account for 37 per cent of exposed economic activity, but only 11 per cent of the world’s flood-exposed population, while low- and lower-middle-income countries account for 52 per cent of exposed people, but only 16 per cent of exposed economic activity.
The researchers said “flood risk exposure does not account for existing flood protection measures”, which “tend to be better developed in high-income countries, meaning that the fraction of exposed economic activity lost during a flood tends to be higher in low-income countries”.